Welcome to episode 275 (“Twitter, Mastodon and AI”) of the EdTech Situation Room from December 7, 2022, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week Jason Neiffer (@techsavvyteach) and Wesley Fryer (@wfryer) discussed the rise of Mastodon and the demise of Twitter, continuing conversations from episode 274 almost a month ago. My what a lot of technology news happened in the past month! Confusion and problems over Elon Musk’s new “anyone can pay for Twitter verification” policy, the significant uptick in hate speech on Twitter since Musk took over the platform, the importance of social media verification not only among journalists but also for African-American users on “Black Twitter,” were explored. The remarkable capabilities of “Lensa AI ,”to create avatars from uploaded selfie photos, shock and awe among educators over generative AI content creation platforms (summarized well in the Atlantic article, “The College Essay is Dead” were also explored. The episode post image was created using the generative AI platform, “MidJourney.” Our show was live streamed and archived simultaneously on YouTube Live as well as our Facebook Live page via StreamYard.com, and compressed to a smaller video version (about 100MB) on AmazonS3 using Handbrake software. Please follow us on Twitter @edtechSR for updates, and join us LIVE on Wednesday nights (normally) if you can at 9 pm Eastern / 8 pm Central / 7 pm Mountain / 7 pm Pacific or 3 am UTC. All shownotes are available on http://edtechSR.com/links. Stay savvy and safe!
Shownotes
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- Jason Neiffer (@techsavvyteach) – blog: blog.ncce.org
- Wes Fryer (@wfryer) – wesfryer.com/after
- How Mastodon and the Fediverse put social networks in people’s hands (PC World, 30 Nov 2022)
- Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find (NY Times, 2 Dec 2022)
- Mastodon conversation with Adam Mackay (focusing on generative AI platform “MidJourney“)
- Great podcast discussion Twitter verification with Bridget Todd and Joelle Monique
- AI experts are increasingly afraid of what they’re creating (Vox; 29 November 2022) “What’s the worst that could happen?”
- Read This Before You Jump on the Lensa “Magic Avatar” Trend (Hyperallergic; 6 December 2022)
- Lensa AI, the app making ‘magic avatars,’ raises red flags for artists (TechCrunch; 5 December 2022)
- ChatGPT Version 4
- The College Essay Is Dead: Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia (The Atlantic, 6 Dec 2022)
- This artist is dominating AI-generated art. And he’s not happy about it. (MIT Tech Review, 16 Sept 2022)
- Jason’s been playing with AI writing platform lex.page
- The long-awaited US broadband internet maps are here — for you to challenge (The Verge; 18 November 2022)
- FCC Broadband Map
- Stalkers’ “chilling” use of AirTags spurs class-action suit against Apple (ArsTechnica, 6 Dec 2022)
- Episode post image created using MidJourney (on Flickr)
- MidJourney creation syntax for our post image (on Flickr)
- Wes’ Geeks of the Week: Wes: Generative AI is Here. Who Should Control It? (The Fork podcast, 21 Oct 2022) – NC Power Grid Attacks (Dec 2022)
- Jason’s Geek of the Week: BackMarket
